Queer Domesticities Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London

Queer Domesticities is about the ways in which queer men have made, experienced and described their homes in London. It is about how they did those things in relation to trenchant stereotypes which cast them as either sissy home boys or domestic outlaws, and in relation also to the immediate pressing contexts of the places they lived through choice or force of circumstance. Matt Cook's book takes queer history indoors and shows additional ways in which queer men orientated their sense of themselves – behind closed doors and apart from the more public bars, clubs, cruising grounds, courtrooms, and protest and pride marches that have more often drawn our attention. In this way it casts in historical perspective the new interest in the home lives and styles of gay men which has come with legal change on civil partnerships, gay marriage and adoption and with TV and media depictions of gay men with particular domestic flair. The book rests on oral histories and unpublished diaries of relatively unknown men and on reassessments of famous and infamous figures, including artists Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts, architect and romantic socialist C.R.Ashbee, early reformer George Ives, interior designer Oliver Ford, writer and editor J.R.Ackerley, 'stately homo' Quentin Crisp, playwright Joe Orton and film-maker Derek Jarman.

Matt Cook is Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK, and Co-director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. He works on the history of sexuality and on urban history and is author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality (2003) and editor of A Gay History of Britain (2007) and Queer 1950s (2012, with Heike Bauer).

Introduction
PART I: BEAUTIFUL HOMES
Introduction
1. Domestic Passions: Unpacking the Homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts
2. Queer Interiors: from C.R.Ashbee to Oliver Ford
Epilogue: Neil Bartlett and the Queer 'Comfort of Things'
PART II: QUEER FAMILIES
Introduction
3. George Ives, Queer Lives and the Family
4. Joe Randolph Ackerley's 'Family Values'
Epilogue: Queer Fathers: Peter McGraith
PART III OUTSIDERS INSIDE
Introduction
5. Remembering Bedsitterland: Rex Batten, Carl Marshall and Alan Louis
6. Homes Fit for Homos: Joe Orton's Queer Domestic
PART IV: TAKING SEXUAL POLITICS HOME
Introduction
7. 'Gay Times': The Brixton Squatters
8. Derek Jarman's Domestic Politics